That was how Jerrod Carmichael ended his 2017 HBO stand-up special “8”; after nearly an hour of riffs, the comedian just casually presented this idea to his audience.
“What else should we talk about?” he continued, right before the special jarringly cut to the credits.
It wasn’t a grand-finale punch line Carmichael had been obviously building toward throughout the 50-plus minutes that preceded it. It lacked catharsis; as an out-of-left-field observation, it could be interpreted as the most deeply personal moment of the performance, or as an absurdist misdirect meant to tease viewers’ expectations.
Maybe it was a bit of both. On Sunday evening, HBO hosted the premiere of “Home Videos,” a loose half-hour of cinéma vérité documenting Carmichael’s off-the-cuff chats with some of the women in his life during a visit to his hometown, Winston-Salem, North Carolina. Instead of performing onstage, the comedian plays an affable investigator, interviewing his subjects about topics like beauty standards, R. Kelly, blackness and sensitive family history.
In one conversation with his mother, Cynthia, he brings up his father’s infidelity and “multiple children outside of the relationship.”
“I’m not going to say the hurt and anger didn’t try to build, because I’m human,” Cynthia tells him. “But — maybe I suppressed some of it — but talking, and asking enough questions, I don’t know. I’m pretty much content.”
She adds that it’s up to her husband to prove to her that he can be trusted again, and that as far as she can tell, he has.
When I sat down with Carmichael at one of his frequent New York City haunts, ABC Kitchen, on a warmish afternoon late last month, the ostensible connection between “8” and “Home Videos” was the first thing I asked him about. While crafting that closing line a couple of years ago, did he have a sense he would return to it?
“It’s an emotional mountain my family has had to climb and is still climbing it in some ways,” he explained. “Saying it at that point, that was as far as I was willing to go, kind of out of respect.”
“Home Videos” might be his most revealing project yet; it’s certainly his most intimate. Over a few days in January,Carmichael directed and shot the special on film (Paul Thomas Anderson’s “Phantom Thread” was an inspiration) with one camera and a small crew in and around the homes of his mother, his sister and a family friend. Short vignettes between the segments show him playing around with his nieces in their quiet suburban neighborhood.
It’s difficult to pin down what exactly “Home Videos” is supposed to be. Carmichael isn’t sure either, though he described it as equal parts “investigative piece,” “just videos” and a “prestige reality show.”
“I didn’t know what it was, but I knew the intention, and just off the intention of it (HBO) trusted me to go and make something.”
The idea was born in part out of a desire to see the black women in his life represented on-screen in ways he hadn’t seen before. He pitched the show to his family as having an “honest conversation” and prepared no questions beforehand. He had one rule for his subjects: “Just don’t lie.”
“‘Even if you don’t want to talk about something, tell me,’” he told them.
He added, “‘No performance for the camera. Me and you, we’re here. Let’s see what happens.’”
What happens is not unlike an episode of his acclaimed but underseen family sitcom “The Carmichael Show,” which ended after three seasons in 2017, or one of his stand-up routines: an ever-curious Carmichael pokes, prods and interrogates comfort zones and widely held beliefs and customs.
When he teases his older sister Valencia, their closeness and ease with one another is palpable, and it feels as if “Home Videos” is dropping in on a conversation they’ve had many times before.
Carmichael described their dynamic as involving a lot of passionate debate and the occasional “clash.” He ribs her about her vocal defense of black womanhood, he said, to “make sure she believes it.”
“I want to kick the tires, and I want her to do the same for me,” he added. “That’s just what our relationship is; I love it.”
In another scene, he speaks with 11-year-old Joliet, Valencia’s bookish daughter, about school, role models and whether she sees herself represented in film and TV. When he asks her to tell him the secret to being happy, she responds, in part: “You have to know what you want, not what everyone else wants.”
Carmichael is taken aback. “Who the (expletive) are you?” he says, laughing.
I asked him if today’s kids and teens made him feel hopeful about society’s future.
“Oh, yeah,” he said. “I think what black kids were to sports and entertainment, they’re going to be to nuclear physics or biochemistry.”
He added, “Even my hood cousin’s kids sound like Tia and Tamera,” referring to the Mowry twins, the precocious stars of the ’90s sitcom “Sister, Sister.” “I don’t know how that happened. They have an awareness their parents didn’t have, their aunts and uncles didn’t have.”
This perspective is a stark pivot from “8,” where he stated his wish that black people as a collective were “further along,” and which largely consisted of Carmichael’s agonizing over his inability to feel for or care about, well, anything. (Including, but not limited to: animals, weddings, the “I Have a Dream” speech.)
He admits that at that time he “felt passionately about my lack of passion for certain things.” Now, he said, he can better acknowledge his own feelings, particularly as they relate to Joliet.
“It’s funny — with her, I would die for her. Like, actually die for her,” he said. “And that’s a thing that, being honest with myself, I didn’t realize I felt until — just this moment you look at her like, ‘Oh wow, this is incredibly powerful, what this is.’”
It’s the conversation with his mother in “Home Videos,” however, that most implies Carmichael is a bit more sensitive than he’s seemed in the past. At one point, he asks if she finally accepts that she, a dark-skinned woman, is in fact pretty.
“She’s always struggled with that,” Carmichael told me. “She’s a beautiful, beautiful person, and watching her not be able to come to terms with that — as a son, it breaks your heart.”
When it came to his mother’s relationship with his father, Carmichael said there were things he had sensed while growing up but hadn’t dug into deeply. While he approached this opportunity to discuss it with his mother as if it were their “last conversation ever,” he was also careful not to press the issue too much.
“I wanted to protect her from going too deep on certain things that might be too sensitive,” he said.
If he held back, the conversation as it appears in “Home Videos” is still striking to watch. There’s no hedging or hesitancy in Cynthia’s answers to her son’s potentially awkward questions about her love life and rocky marriage to his dad.
And Carmichael’s statement that he’s hooked up with men — an off-handed remark following his question of whether she finds other women attractive — is dropped in unexpectedly in the middle of their chat, and just as quickly left behind, in “8”-like fashion.
Carmichael has talked about dating women in his comedy and on “The Carmichael Show,” but until this point had not publicly discussed his relationships with men. When I asked him about this, he was reluctant to consider the comment as worth remarking on. “It’s a thing I said to my mom,” he said after a long pause, laughing.
“That was it,” he continued. “A thing I said to my mom. I was just talking to my mom. Thing came up. I said it to my mom. Now we’re eating peas at ABC Kitchen. But that’s how I feel about everything that’s in there — it’s just like, ‘Yeah, and then that happened.’”
“Home Videos” ends on its own kind of post-credits cliffhanger: Carmichael meeting one of his half-siblings for the first time. The week before we met, Carmichael had gone back to North Carolina to shoot what might be another installment of the show with his father, Joe, and uncle.
At the time of our interview, Carmichael wasn’t sure if the episode would be released, but he did say that his grandfather, who had more than two dozen children with his wife and other women, was one of the topics he discussed with his uncle.
He said he didn’t know if his father had been completely forthcoming during their conversation. “Obviously you would like to believe everything,” he said. But “you look at history, you look at patterns, and like, it makes it difficult.”
“But,” Carmichael added, “he was willing enough to explore his feelings and explore logic and that type of thing.”
“Home Videos,” as it exists now for public consumption, is reflective of where Carmichael seems to be in this moment — “really happy” with life, experimental and cautiously open to letting viewers get a glimpse of his origin story. For now, he’s lost interest in standup as a means of channeling his “obsessions,” and is absorbed with the idea of directing and eager to reach a point where he can finally make his first feature film.
But Dave Chappelle and Chris Rock have urged him to keep performing. “I don’t know what more motivation I would need than two living icons of the form just really wanting me to do it more,” Carmichael said. “I just need to get a few things out first, and then we’ll see.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.